Introduction
In today's world, data is everywhere. A typical organization has data scattered across different data repositories. What this means is that each application, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), point of sale (POS), and enterprise resource planning (ERP), has its own data source. By having these different, disconnected data sources, you risk not gaining a clear picture of who your customer is. As a result, you likely have difficulty ensuring that you can meet their needs throughout their entire journey with your company. To better understand their customers and to build better customer journeys, more organizations are using a Customer Data Platform.
Customer Data Platforms centralize your customer data from your different data silos to provide deeper insights into that data. Additionally, it helps make that data available to other systems. Accordingly, you can provide personalized journeys for your customers, from day one, based on who they are, how they engage with you, and how they live their lives. Ultimately, these personalized experiences matter because people are the reason for having a Customer Data Platform.
The first part of any Customer Data Platform solution is to provide a consolidated view of your customers. You can achieve this goal by collecting as much data as possible and unifying it into a single view of the customer. Consider this approach as creating a digital twin of your customers. This digital twin consists of understanding the digital touch points that a customer has with your organization. You want to engage with, capture, and understand as much about your customers' digital activities as possible. The more digital activities that you can capture and understand, the clearer the picture of them you have.
Every digital activity, such as an email that a customer sends or receives, creates an engagement data point that helps you build a more complete digital twin of your customer. As you gain more touch points, they collectively create a foundation of customer data and begin to provide a clearer image of the customer's digital twin.
Some of these touch points include:
Web searches
Social posts
TXT messages
Events attended
Webpages visited
Orders placed
Cases created
Products returned
Customer survey responses
Capturing a customer's engagements provides only part of the story. To truly gain a 360-degree view of a customer, you need to understand the context of who they are. For example, by including data such as where they live, their household income, or the number of children they have, you can have a clearer representation of who that person is. This level of understanding is often done with the help of enrichment data that can fill in the gaps left by your internal data sources. Enrichment data might include details such as brand affinities, hobbies, financial details, and other demographic information.
With a clear and complete digital twin that represents who your customers are, you can use that information to gain deeper insights about who they are. These insights help you provide deeper, more personalized experiences.
By examining how much a customer is spending and what they're buying, you can provide recommendations on items. For example, you can recommend subscription services that provide them with greater cost savings over what they're doing today. You can monitor how engaged a customer is with your company, and you can be proactive when engagement falls below what would be considered healthy levels. These activities help you stay engaged with customers across all different touch points where you're interacting with them.